Fear, Love, and Liberation in Contemporary Québec: A Feminist Reflection

By Alexa Conradi and Catherine Browne

In response to rapid and unsettling social, economic, and climate changes, fearmongering now features as a main component of public life. Right-wing nationalist populism has become a hallmark of politics around the world. No less so in Quebec. Alexa Conradi has made it her life’s work to understand and to generate thoughtful debate about this worrisome trend. As the first President of Québec solidaire and the president of Canada’s largest feminist organisation, the Fédération des femmes du Québec, Conradi refused to shy away from difficult issues: the Charter of Quebec Values, religion and Islam, sovereignty, rape culture and violence against women, extractive industries and the treatment of Indigenous women, austerity policy and the growing gap between rich and poor. This determination to address uncomfortable subjects has made Conradi—an anglo-Montrealer—a sometimes controversial leader. In Fear, Love, and Liberation in Contemporary Quebec, Conradi invites us to take off our rose-coloured glasses and to examine Quebec’s treatment of women with more honesty. Through her personal reflections on Quebec politics and culture, she dispels the myth that gender equality has been achieved and paves the way for a more critical understanding of what remains to be done.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: Jan 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781771134156

Alexa Conradi

Alexa Conradi is an award-winning author, speaker, trainer, and feminist activist. From 2006 to 2009 she served as the first elected president of Québec solidaire and from 2009 to 2015 she was president of Canada's largest feminist organisation, the Fédération des femmes du Québec.

Book preview

One

On Having a Voice

When I was born in England to English-speaking Canadian parents, one of whom was a father who had migrated from Norway as a child, nobody could have known that thirty-eight years later I would find myself at the heart of the fault lines that divide Quebec society. Certainly, nothing predestined me to take part in society’s debates—in French—on behalf of the Fédération des femmes du Québec (FFQ, the Quebec Women's Federation), an organization deeply rooted in the history of Quebec. Yet it is in Quebec that I have felt at home. It is here that I learned my political lessons, raised my children, and dreamed of a just society. So it is not surprising that it is with Quebec that I have my deepest quarrels. Out of love. I care about its future, even if I am not an old stock Quebecer. Even when I have been told I have no right to speak.

This book is my way of making peace with the tensions that have marked my journey—tensions that pervade Quebec society. The question that haunts me is: How can we build a society where everyone truly counts? Halfway between the personal and the political, this book deals with my experience with Quebec and its relation to social justice and belonging. Growing up between London, Toronto, and the west end of Montreal, I did not have much contact with Quebec’s French-speaking majority during my childhood. Even though my parents sent me to immersion school to become bilingual, it was not until I was an adult that I came into full contact with the everyday reality of French-speaking Quebec. A series of coincidences led me to invest wholeheartedly in Quebec society.

The first is that my parents and my brother moved to Calgary because of my father’s job when I was eighteen. He was a banker and was moved to a new city following each promotion. There was no way I wanted to move to what I thought of as a conservative city. So I settled in the east end of Montreal to begin my university studies at McGill University. Around me, I heard almost only French. It was the first time I really travelled east of Saint-Laurent Boulevard. This was the early 1990s—change is slow! I was the only one of my family to stay in Quebec. The others had moved to British Columbia, the United States, India, Nepal, or Ontario.

The second coincidence is that, at McGill, I met a Francophone and married him in 1991. His parents were immigrants from France and Hungary. He grew up with the national liberation movement that was a vital element of Quebec politics in the 1970s. He was politicized and supported Quebec independence. He introduced me to a whole new world. We had two children together. Our relationship ended in 1995, but not my attachment to Quebec society.

The third coincidence is that in looking for help with my new role as a mother at the age of twenty, I ended up spending a lot of time at the Verdun Women’s Centre. This is where I moved from being a budding feminist to being a feminist committed to popular movements for social justice. I was far from the young people I had grown up with, far from the affluent, English-speaking world that had been my childhood environment. In fact, we had little money and lived in Little Burgundy in a one-bedroom apartment (a four-and-a-half, as we say in Montreal) that was full of mould.

I had helped occupy buildings used by obstetricians who were blocking the recognition of midwifery. Now, I was looking for somewhere to get involved. The centre gave me a place to learn about popular education and feminist collective action and, eventually, my first job in the women’s movement.

Thus began an intense adventure with political life in Quebec: its media, its governments, its political parties, its feminist milieu, its social movements. I say intense because I have been at the heart of some of the most emotional and antagonistic debates of the last fifteen years. Reasonable accommodations and the Charter of Values. Rape culture. Austerity. The relationship of Quebec and Canada to Indigenous peoples. These debates put me in touch with Quebec’s awareness gaps. For example, Quebec society imagines itself to be more egalitarian in terms of gender relations than it actually is. That is why it underestimates the work that remains to be done to enable women and non-binary people to live in freedom and justice.

Inequalities become deeper as we ignore them. We find it difficult to hear the stories that we must understand if we want to build a society where everyone has a voice. The truths that we do not want to acknowledge are located in our awareness gaps, which is why we expend so much energy protecting ourselves against them. The idea of awareness gaps helps me to understand the acrimony and even violence with which people sometimes reacted when I took part in public debates. Putting pressure on a wound obviously generates a strong reaction. But how can we eliminate inequalities if we refuse to see what is right in front of us? This makes us rigid and narrow.

To the dismay of my family, I have always liked to address taboos; I get a feeling of suffocation whenever something is forbidden. However, forcing everyone to face their taboos does entail some risks. For one thing, some people do not like you. I discovered that people who identified with my public interventions were ready to shower me with affection, while others hated me with a palpable passion. I admit that I did not always find it easy to accept this role, especially since the public space today is particularly hard on women who are disruptive, queer, and of non-French-Canadian origin.

I am still convinced that examining awareness gaps is necessary for energy to circulate and renewal to become possible. It is by trying to understand the resistance that appears when awareness gaps are exposed that we build the conditions for greater freedom. I am convinced of this. But we must expect sparks to fly.

After taking a break from the public sphere, I am resuming my role as a shift disturber¹ with the publication of this book. At a time when some voices are not heard, and some realities are barely accepted, I am impelled to speak up and rock the boat again. To do this, I will write about the awareness gaps I came across as part of my participation in public debates in Quebec. By examining these shadowy areas, I hope to nourish the people who are orchestrating a great mash-up of Quebec society. Quebec has a long tradition of mobilization around social justice. My wish is that this tradition be renewed so that it incorporates knowledge held at the margin.

You who read these lines may already know that I left Quebec in August 2015 for a kind of exile. Having been at the heart of society’s tensions a little too long and intensely, I fell ill. Dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder that fuelled a burnout and physical health problems, I went to Germany for a change of air. The violence of the debates on secularism and Islam had finally brought me down. I managed to hold on long enough to oversee a significant FFQ policy convention, one that is held once every ten years, before falling in battle, so to speak. I went on health leave in May 2015 and was unable to finish my term, which ended in October of the same year.

The trigger? An umpteenth woman of a certain age who accosted me in the street to tell me that I had betrayed both women and Quebec by defending the right of women wearing the hijab to work in public service. She said to me in a tone of disgust: There are many Muslim women, veiled women, North African women in your organization. She believed the theory that the FFQ had been Islamized. As if the presence of these women was suspicious rather than a sign of citizens’ involvement and the FFQ’s success in making space for them. Her hatred of me and Muslim women was palpable. For her, people like me represented a threat to women and Quebec society.

For her and for others, I had become the sworn enemy. I felt hunted. Women advocating for a particular vision of secularism made life difficult for the FFQ. We were accused of being the mouthpiece of Islamists, of having allowed Islamists to infiltrate the FFQ, of having taken money from Salafists. The organization’s credibility was challenged, and the legitimacy of its public funding was questioned in the mainstream media. It became commonplace to criticize the FFQ, as if its positions were totally irrational and unacceptable. And yet, these were positions that FFQ members had taken plenty of time to think about and discuss—and that they have confirmed several times since then. All of these women had not lost their minds! But our awareness gaps sometimes make it impossible for us to understand the logic behind another person’s position.

The effect of awareness gaps is particularly obvious when the debate focuses on Quebec’s identity. The conservative tone of some political actors’ discourse on Quebec identity tends to reduce the possibility of genuine citizens’ equality in Quebec. I experienced this. I was made to feel that I was less equal than other Quebecers because I did not belong to the cultural majority. Over and over again, I was told that I was not a Quebecer, that my words were not legitimate, that I could not appropriately represent Quebec women. I was accused of being a mere Canadian multiculturalist imposing her vision on the people of Quebec. As if I were a foreign body.

Until then, I was under the impression that I belonged to a political community, Quebec. But this constant charge undermined my feeling of having a place in society. I finally started to feel that my home had been taken away from me. Debates on reasonable accommodations and on the Charter of Quebec Values² made me feel that I was not welcome. It was with a sense of urgency that I went into exile so that I would no longer have to endure hostility. I do not think I am alone in feeling exiled from my own society, whether other people have left the country or not. The debate on national identity has left a wound that is difficult to heal, especially since these debates won’t go away; we keep going back to them. And yet, a fair share of the population continues to deny the violence that such debates entail. I think they are shooting themselves in the foot, for the people most harmed by their attitude are the ones who have the strongest sense of belonging to Quebec society.

In this book, I cannot avoid talking about some of the misunderstandings and injustices related to the fear of Islam and Muslims. Quebec is not alone in having become afraid, and this must be acknowledged. Everyone’s fears about globalization, neoliberalism, and environmental crises seem to have crystallized around the fear of Muslims, who are viewed as threatening potential terrorists, or bearers of a retrograde ideology. The scenes that preoccupy and divide Quebec are also being performed in many other Western nations. At the same time, there are also unique aspects to the Quebec debates. How does a formerly colonized society face its own history of colonization? But Quebec is not alone in experiencing major turbulence. That’s why this book echoes the political situation elsewhere in the world.

Some of our awareness gaps include the scale of economic injustice and Quebec’s relationship with Indigenous peoples. The authors of many reflections and criticisms circulating in the public space find it difficult to grasp to what extent social movements have challenged dominant standards. Quebec society is in contact with a version of our aspirations that is either watered down or sensationalized. The mainstream media too often filter debates, presenting issues in terms defined by dominant standards. With this book, I would like to provide a fuller version of these ideas and discourses that are so difficult to hear. It is important to make the terms of our public deliberations more flexible.

At the intersection of voices preoccupied with social justice, freedom, and solidarity, I offer a feminist reading of political issues as they affect Quebec society.

This book argues that feminist perspectives can make a contribution to any reflection on society. I locate feminism at the heart of Quebec’s future and its debates. It’s time for feminism to take its rightful place in social and political life. Not on the sidelines, not in the women’s section of the bookstore—at the centre.

This book is also an opportunity for me to take back my right to speak and my place in my society, despite injunctions to keep quiet. By sharing my thoughts, I am re-engaging, signalling that I belong to the future of Quebec, despite those who would rather not hear voices like mine.

Anyone interested in politics and power relations will find something in this book, as will anyone interested in political currents emerging on the left, in feminism, or in antiracist circles. As my activism and my studies evolved over time, so did my approach and my analyses. I hope, in telling this story, that the reasons for these changes in myself and in society will become clearer. It seems to me that for many people, positions such as mine are unintelligible. In nine-second clips, there is no way to make connections between ideas. This book proffers the missing pieces. It explains how I came to defend a feminist, antiracist, and decolonial perspective.

We will certainly have agreements and disagreements. All the better. The idea is not to be right. My goal is to share what my life story has taught me and continues to teach me. I want to put forward my thoughts as part of a dialogue.

Two

Letting Go of Fear

I believe Quebec is at a crossroads. The ground of life and politics in Quebec is shifting. An important period in its recent history is coming to an end. The Quiet Revolution, the great project to modernize Quebec, belongs to the past. With economic globalization, in which the state’s role becomes overseeing the implementation of neoliberal policy, and a series of identity crises, we are living through anxiety-producing times. While for many, the years of mobilization that built the Quebec state were years of pride, hope, and solidarity, today’s dynamics instead create fear. Quebec is well acquainted with fear. The story of the Québécois people is shaped by images of conquest, the Grande Noirceur (the Great Darkness),³ and survival. The fear of disappearing is never far away. People are afraid of losing ground, disappearing, being excluded, becoming poorer, no longer being useful, not being welcome. From identity-related anxiety to fears related to the climate or the economy, fear has become a heavyweight in Quebec politics.

Fear does not have to be the defining narrative of today. The movements that gave life to the Quiet Revolution were based on hope. They called on us to move collectively from fear to self-affirmation, to be carried upward by social justice. For a while, fear was set aside. There was so much to be done, and both confidence and indignation were there. The English-speaking elite and the Catholic Church needed to be pushed aside so that people of French-Canadian origin, and Québécois culture, could take their rightful place in history. This movement led to the construction of the Quebec state and endowed it with a number of progressive policies and a market economy belonging to a new French-speaking elite. It also opened the doors of education to thousands of Quebecers who were finally able to leave poverty behind.

During this period, a society was created that thought of itself as egalitarian and based on solidarity. But the drive of the 1970s has been replaced today by a feeling of blockage, largely caused by the political class and its embrace of neoliberalism. More and more, in Quebec and around the world, we are left to ourselves to figure out how to deal with the economy’s random jolts. The social security net is getting smaller by the day. We have to work harder, under more precarious conditions, to compensate for the loss of social programs. This is profoundly destabilizing.

After the referendum defeat of 1995, in addition to facing political blockage at the Canadian level, a significant part of the population has felt the need to reassert itself culturally, sometimes in opposition to a plural we, often in reaction to what are seen as external threats and under the influence of a xenophobic discourse. Imposing a monolithic identity has become the refuge of many indépendantistes (supporters of Quebec independence) who are disappointed in the way things have turned out. Unfortunately, left-wing indépendantistes who reject a monocultural mindset find it difficult to influence the discourse on how to respond to Quebec’s growing diversity.

I, in turn, am frightened by the way certain political parties and media are feeding fear. Many actors refuse any challenge to their way of doing things, in the name of tradition, the people’s pride, and so-called French-Canadian fragility. It’s as if part of the elite were encouraging us to rely not on listening, curiosity, and self-confidence, but on a desire to dominate public debate. Quebecers of French-Canadian origin are encouraged to see themselves as victims of cultural pluralism, invaded by foreigners, who need to defend their territory. But if the living conditions of Quebec’s majority continue to stagnate, diversity can hardly be said to be the cause.

Faced with this pervasive insecurity, many have become nostalgic for a supposedly more stable, more homogenous time—a time when science and technology stood for progress, when the postwar economy brought benefits to the majority, when women knew their place, and when Quebecers of French-Canadian origin knew they were an oppressed minority in Canada.

This wish for a simpler narrative might be preventing us from considering the possibility that the majority of French-Canadian–origin Quebecers is actually doing rather well. That it now controls Quebec’s social, cultural, and political institutions (with the caveat that few states or peoples today control their economy under free trade and globalization). In the space of a few years, the majority has gone from an exploited and oppressed group to a group that is in a position to dominate public debate and shape society’s choices—or at least, such choices as are permitted under a regime governed by neoliberalism.

Is it possible that the survival narrative may no longer be relevant? Can we not finally set aside the story of colonized Quebec, "né pour un petit pain,"⁴ and replace it with a new narrative in which the majority is proud of having carried out a remarkable transition and transformation? That, in any case, is what I believe. Quebec has changed itself for the better by ending a number of